Marketing Right and Avoiding Toxic Pitfalls

[JBShields]

I've always believed that the VN community is the made of the most helpful & supporting developer and players. I've always found wonderful people. I even co-founded a FB page for VN Creators--so I'm all in! I want to grow our community.

How can we spread VNs outside of the only eroge/hentai type labels?

Who else has been criticized for their game NOT having a dating theme? I know this isn't an issue of only my VN project (viewtopic.php?t=47586)

What are you all doing to reach the right audience? My issue is mine isn't a dating game, so I don't know where to go to properly get word out. If I post on Otome boards elsewhere, I get deleted. If I post on VN Fan pages, I get criticized because "it's not Japanese" and there's no sex scenes.

Who else is creating a non-dating VN OR a non-anime style VN? I'd like to hear how they/you all approached getting the word out about your VN.


Thanks! -JB Shields

[papillon]

Look for non-VN story-based-game communities? Gamebooks, RPGs, adventure games, etc.

My main advice would be to try and promote the game with screenshots that make it obvious what it *is* and what's interesting about it. If you show anime style characters and dialog boxes that look like a standard VN, you're setting the expectations of how things will go. But if your game looks like this, people's initial expectations are completely different.

If your game is about making tough moral choices you might want to lead with screenshots showing a tough moral choice, something that sparks the imagination. If your game is about vampire, show some vampire stuff. If your game has gameplay, show that.

Don't just list off characters because displaying a list of characters is usually done in a dating game - it's like the menu, here's all the things you might want to eat.

(Your game is not an otome game in any sense as far as I can tell - not only is there no romance, there's no female protagonist. It doesn't meet the definition. So it makes sense they would delete you.)

[JBShields]

Thanks for your advice, Papillon! I appreciate it. Good points.

I'll look back into how I'm presenting it. So I will need to think of it as this way: "If I was to describe my VN, it would be = modern-day "Interview with a Vampire as a VN", How can I describe it to potential players"?

Btw, I'm a huge fan of your VNs. They're great!

[Kuiper]

I'll echo papillon's comments and say that focusing on what your game is similar to and what communities it does appeal to is a lot more important than focusing on what your game is not. "Not a dating sim" could easily describe games like Call of Duty and Civilization, but you probably wouldn't market your game by comparing yourself to them.

In fact, the audience for your game probably looks more like "people who play romance VNs" than "people who play Call of Duty," so it would probably be counter-productive to intentionally avoid that audience. Obviously, you don't want to sell people a false bill of goods, but you don't want to position yourself in a way that makes people feel like, "If I like romance, then I probably won't like this game."

I'd also note that when I clicked on your game's project page, the first thing I was this Youtube thumbnail:

https://imgur.com/a/rUiP7C0

When I see some woman hanging on the arm of a taller man who has his arm wrapped around her, the first thing I think of is, "Oh, this has the same look as those going to be one of those otome romance games." If I have this expectation, and it turns out your game isn't an otome romance game, I'm going to feel betrayed. And if someone doesn't like romance, they may never get to the part of your pitch that says "not a love story!" because they already clicked away when they saw a thumbnail that looked like romance.

So...if you think the appeal of your game is something other than romance, maybe try to feature that front and center with the visuals. Is the appeal of your game that there's a lot of action and violence? Show me the action. (You don't have to explicitly show me the violence; e.g. I don't need to see blood spattering as a spear enters someone's chest, even if seeing people getting impaled by spears is a big part of the appeal. But if I see someone in a pose that looks like they're ready to swing a life, it gives me a better idea of what kind of story is about. If you want to communicate violence, maybe don't show blood, but show the face of a person who looks like they're wounded or has just taken a painful blow.) Is the appeal of the story that you get to interact with a large and diverse cast of characters that have cool designs? Show me (part of) that cast of cool characters. Is the appeal clever characters that are full of witty one-liners? Maybe show me some characters and give each a quote that tells me something about their personality. Is the appeal that it takes place in an interesting setting? Give me some visual that informs me about what that setting is and gives me some of the appeal.

[LateWhiteRabbit]

Great points already made by Papillon and Kuiper, but I'd also add that just continuously talking about your games as a "VN" or Visual Novel carries certain connotations. Marketing is all about impressions and reaching the intended audience. If the majority of players attach certain expectations to "Visual Novels", you can get away from some of that by calling your game a "Narrative Adventure" or an "Interactive Drama".

Telltale's Walking Dead games were basically visual novels with timed choices. But Telltale knew they weren't going to attract fans of the TV show or fans of zombies by saying "Visual Novel" - so they advertised the games as "Graphic Adventures".

The main output in the Visual Novel genre IS dating narratives, because dating sims were the origin of the genre. So you are naturally going to pick up some of that baggage when you assign your game that genre.

Just something to think about concerning the banner you fly.

[JBShields]

Very good advice you all! I'll relook at how I'm presenting.

You all gave me some things to think about: the story's feeling and graphics.

(But I won't give up the Visual Novel label--even if today many of them are dating narratives. There's a growing number in our community writing stories besides romance). But I will think if there's something else I can use to describe it. Did you know you cannot call anything "Choose Your Own Adventure" ? Recent problem with a movie on Netflix regarding that.